About TeachableMoment

TeachableMoment, a project of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, fosters social responsibility through K-12 classroom lessons that:

encourage inquiry and critical thinking on current issues

support students’ social & emotional learning

TeachableMoment was created in the wake of 9/11. In the days after the tragedy, Morningside Center began receiving calls from teachers who were looking for ways to sensitively address issues related to 9/11 in their classrooms. Our website’s traffic began to grow exponentially. We turned to lifelong educator Alan Shapiro, who had helped found Morningside Center, to help us generate new lessons - and TeachableMoment was born.

TeachableMoment now includes hundreds of issue-oriented classroom lessons, as well as lessons to foster students' social and emotional learning, essays and reviews. It has been recommended as a valuable resource by the websites of PBS, the National Education Association, and many university websites. Laura McClureis the editor and a co-founder of TeachableMoment.org.

Teachers are free to reproduce TeachableMoment lessons for use in their classrooms. For permission to reprint materials for widespread circulation, please email: lmcclure@morningsidecenter.org.